


paradox

by Inkstained_Dreamer



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Doriath, Gen, Inspired by the Lay of Leithian, Neurodiversity, a little bit eldritch I guess?, this is why you don't infantilize your children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27994677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkstained_Dreamer/pseuds/Inkstained_Dreamer
Summary: Lúthien is different. And different scares people.
Relationships: Beren Erchamion & Lúthien Tinúviel, Elu Thingol | Elwë Singollo/Melian
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23





	paradox

**Author's Note:**

> I recently read Beren and Lúthien, which included most of the Lay of Leithian, and I noticed something that interested me: in the Lay, Lúthien is often referred to as "frail," "little," etc. At first, I put this down to sexism in her society, but then I started thinking--what if Lúthien really was small and frail? And what if that was related to her ancestry? So I wrote that idea out as a Hanukkah gift to myself. :)  
> I hope you enjoy!

Lúthien was born with her eyes closed and a blue tinge to her skin. Breath barely stirred her tiny chest. Privately, the court of Doriath thought that maybe there was a reason why no Maiar had previously joined with elves, but they were careful to keep that thought securely in their heads. Everyone was a little afraid of Queen Melian, after all. She was beautiful and gentle, and thankfully lacked Thingol’s capricious moods, but no one really could forget that she wasn’t of their world. Light flowed through her veins, not blood, and she had a way of staring that unsettled the whole court (except, perhaps, Thingol, who was too much in love with his wife to call any of her traits frightening). 

But somehow, two days after her birth, Lúthien came to a counsel meeting with her father, tied in a sling against his chest. She was breathing. Her round, dark eyes were open. She had a full head of black hair. And teeth. Sharp teeth, miniscule but pointed like a wolf’s. Thingol’s advisors whispered to each other. Thingol didn’t notice. He was too busy caressing his child’s downy hair and crooning into her ears. No one saw Queen Melian for a few weeks after Lúthien appeared. Some thought that she might’ve gone back to Valinor. Others thought she was dead, if Maiar could even die.

But she appeared again, if a little thinner and wanner than before, and seemed to take as much joy in her growing daughter as her husband did. They seemed oblivious to the discomfort of the court whenever they let little Lúthien, now several years old, toddle around the hall, chasing the sleek hunting hounds and giving fanged smiles to everyone she passed.

When she was twenty, Lúthien fell sick. Melian and Thingol smiled at the court, assuring them that all was well and the princess would be fine, but everyone noticed that their faces looked strained, and their eyes were troubled, as the months stretched out and Lúthien did not reappear. 

“I won’t say I didn’t expect this,” Melian told her husband one evening, as they sat, huddled over their daughter’s bed. “Her fëa is burning her from the inside out.”

Thingol looked over at her. “But you gave her your flesh.”

“Yes.” Melian nodded. “But it is not enough. And I cannot give her more and stay in your world.”

Thingol reached out and took his wife’s hand. “She’ll be fine. She has a strong mother. She’ll pull through.”

Melian leaned her head on his shoulder and said nothing. Dread pulled at her heart as Lúthien tossed and turned, mumbling garbled words in Sindarin, sometimes even in the strange, chiming tongue of the Valar. Cracks appeared in her skin, glowing. Thingol could taste burning in the air. Melian began to sing, almost desperately, resting her hand on Lúthien’s sweat-streaked forehead. 

And, though no one, especially not her parents, knew how, Lúthien recovered. The sickly, strange light faded, her eyes grew clear, and she slept as peacefully as she always had. The court exhaled. Lúthien may be unsettling, to say the least, but no one had wished any harm on her. 

But the ropy, bluish scars never faded from Lúthien’s skin. Her parents dressed her in tunics with long sleeves that fell over her hands and hid her arms from view. The court didn’t need another reason to fear their princess. 

So Lúthien grew. Alone. She had no siblings; Melian flatly refused to even consider bearing another child, and all the other children of Menegroth were too wary of Lúthien to befriend her. Her parents loved her, Lúthien knew that, but she was lonely. And as the years passed, she began to ache, inside and out. Her mother carried her when they walked together in the woods. Her father hovered over her when she slept, anxiously watching her chest rise and fall with labored breaths. Her scars began to glow again, searing like liquid fire. Lúthien cried silent tears under her favorite beech tree, and begged the faraway gods her mother told stories of to take it all away. 

But even they couldn’t do that. No one had anticipated Lúthien and no one, not even the gods, had any idea of how to resolve a life that in itself was a paradox.

As the decades flew around her, Lúthien grew used to the pain. She learned to smile so that no one flinched at her teeth, she learned to walk without jerking her arms, she learned that normal children didn’t hear the shadows talking and most definitely did not talk back to them. She sang, she read, she sewed, she picked flowers with the other girls, who never seemed to laugh when she was there. 

But at night, Lúthien was free. She sat in the cool darkness and hummed to herself, rocking back and forth with her arms around her knees. She read in her father’s library, or watched the stars, or, if she could get past the guards, danced in the grassy, moonlit clearings where she could let the air caress her scarred arms and bare her teeth at the sky. 

The nights were when Lúthien belonged to herself, and only to herself. She was whole. She was wild. She was beautiful in a way that meant something to her, not to everyone else. 

Thousands of nights passed before the night where everything changed. When Beren, weary and fearful and filthy, stumbled into Doriath and fell down to rest in the long grass at the edge of a glade. Lúthien was angry that night, at her body, that failed her, at her father, who underestimated her, and at the world that saw her as one thing and only one thing--beautiful. Lúthien danced a dance of rage, snarling, spinning, jumping, flying up towards the moon, again and again until her legs ached.

When Beren woke, dizzy with sleep, he saw her, silhouetted against the starry sky, panting, her scars glowing palely, her teeth bared in an almost wolfish growl.

And he was not afraid. He was entranced. He saw Lúthien for what she was, and he, unlike Thingol’s court, didn’t recoil from the sight that met him. 

When Lúthien turned and saw him staring, she stared back, and this dirty, bedraggled human did not even quiver. He smiled, a pure smile full of love. 

And when Lúthien smiled back, he didn’t cringe at her fangs. He sighed in wonder, in joy at this person who was everything he was not and yet everything he was. 

She spoke, and if he heard the way some words came too fast, and others came too slow, he thought of it as music.

He traced her scars with a fingertip, gentle, almost reverent. Without a trace of fear or disgust or even confusion. Lúthien didn’t shiver at his touch.

But, many nights later, when Lúthien brought Beren back with her at dawn, her father shook his head and gestured to his guards.

_ I love him!  _ Lúthien yelled.

_ It’s not logical _ , said her father.  _ You’ll forget him in a few centuries. It is better for you this way. _

_ You don’t know that!  _ Lúthien cried.  _ You don’t know! _

But her father, intent on protecting his little daughter from the world, ignored her, and, with a smile that was like a sheet of ice, set Beren an impossible task, offering Lúthien like a prize at a fair, trying to stop her with locks and guards.

(Thingol learned too late that it wasn’t his daughter he needed to protect from the world, it was the world he needed to protect from his daughter.)

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!  
> And for all of you celebrating today, have a very happy Hanukkah!! May your dreidels role well and your latkes be the perfect texture. :)  
> (And for all of my non-Hanukkah-celebrating friends, I hope you have lovely holidays as well!)


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